"I don't think I ought to refuse to hear anything you have to say about faith-cure, Philip. You evidently differ with me. But I want to know the truth; and I--" here Phillida made a long pause, smoothing out the folds of her gown the meanwhile. "I will tell you, Cousin Phil, that I am not always so confident as I used to be about the matter." Mrs. Gouverneur looked into the room at this moment, but perceiving that the conversation had taken on a half-confidential tone, she only said: "I'll have to leave you with Philip a little longer, Phillida. I have some things to see to," and went out again. Philip went to a drawer of rare old prints, and turned them over rapidly until he came to one of Charles II. touching for the king's evil. "There," he said; "Charles was a liar, a traitor who took money to betray the interests of his country, and a rake of the worst. You wouldn't believe that he could cure sickness by any virtue in his royal touch. Yet great doctors and clergymen of the highest ranks certify incredible things regarding the marvelous cures wrought by him. If one might believe their solemn assertions, more cures were wrought by him than by any other person known to history. The only virtue that Charles possessed was lodged in his finger-tips." "How do you account for it?" "The evidence of a cure is the obscurest thing in the world. People get well by sheer force of nature in most cases. Every patent medicine and every quack system is therefore able to count up its cures. Then, too, many diseases are mere results of mental disturbance or depression. The mind has enormous influence on the body. I know a doctor who cured a woman that had not walked for years by setting fire to the bedding where she lay and leaving her a choice to exert herself or be burned." "But there are the cures by faith related in the Bible. I am afraid that if I give up modern cures I must lose my faith in miracles," said Phillida. An unusual tenderness in Philip's speech had dissipated her reserve, and she was in a mood to lay bare her heart. In this last remark she disclosed to Philip her main difficulty. With a mind like hers such things are rather matters of association than of simple logic. Religion and miracles were bound up in the same bundle in her mind. To reject the latter was to throw away the former, and this, by another habitual association in her mind, would have seemed equivalent to the moral subversion of the universe. On the other hand she had associated modern faith-healing with Scripture miracles; the rejection of faith-cures involved therefore a series of consequences that seemed infinitely disastrous.